


like me

by mediumbear



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Established Relationship, Friend Crush, M/M, Pining, Queer as in Questioning, Teen Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:34:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23400034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mediumbear/pseuds/mediumbear
Summary: It's like Shuu doesn't know he's special to him.
Relationships: Himuro Tatsuya/Kagami Taiga, Himuro Tatsuya/Nijimura Shuuzou
Kudos: 9





	like me

**Author's Note:**

> Established nijihimu in LA, summer of his first year of high school
> 
> Do you ever get sad about Tatsuya left all alone in LA for that year and a bit cause I DO EVERY DAY

"A guy like you's gotta have more friends around, right?" 

Tatsuya lifts his head from atop his knees where the two of them are perched on the concrete steps, and looks curiously at him. The skate park bustles with the click of skateboards. Shouts and cheers - but mostly taunts - ring across the half-pipe. Shuu's bloodied knee has left its legacy with a dramatic red smear across the one unfinished patch of cement on the track. A fuckup, he'd thought, until Tatsuya called it _proof he was trying_. He doesn't feel like cleaning himself up just yet.

“Is that sarcasm?” Tatsuya replies just as bluntly as he’d been asked, rare for him.

“You know I wouldn’t try it,” Shuu lifts his hands in surrender. He isn’t trying to be cute but it softens Tatsuya for a split second, a smile budding in his mouth before he’s back on the hook like a persistent catch.

"How do you mean?" 

For once, he sounds like he doesn't know exactly what's being insinuated.

"Well, you know…" Shuu looks away, his top lip curling into that sullen pout Tatsuya loves, "Guys like us.”

Tatsuya sets his hand in his chin and smiles at him pleasantly. “I don’t have any hidden Japanese guys in the streetball crew. Pretty much everyone I know, you’ve met now.”

“No, like, _queer._ You've gotta know some other folks like that around here. You get around."

Behind them someone slips off their board and it goes shooting up the half-pipe before landing back in the middle of the concrete with a crack. It’s simply bizarre to hear him say that word aloud, in such a place, amongst such people. He’d never dream of it. His comment leaves Tatsuya silent, and Shuu pats him on the back straight away, his touch landing well-aimed between the shoulderblades.

"You know what I mean even if I said it like a dipshit."

Tatsuya exhales. "That was a _little_ shitty."

"Sorry."

"It's okay. I'm just thinking."

Shuu’s not the kind of person to ask these things out of the blue, but that doesn’t change the fact that Tatsuya isn’t one to answer them, either. He should be out of his phase of asking stupid questions just because he’s in another country, Tatsuya thinks, so this one throws him. Queer guys. Like _him_? Is that what he’s been mulling on over their quiet stretches of time? Doesn’t he have more important things to worry about? Then, Shuu interrupts his train of thought.

"You ever see anyone else?"

Tatsuya looks at him, silent again.

" _Before,_ I mean, geez." Shuu rolls his eyes.

"Why all the questions?" his tone is sharp.

"Well, you don't have to answer. I figure it’s a ‘no’?"

Their exchange of looks could cut glass, and Tatsuya's the first to break it with a raised eyebrow, though to Shuu it looks like an expression of shock. Maybe it’s a little tasteless to bring this up when he’s leaving for Japan in a couple of weeks for his belated start to high school. 

The thought that perhaps this is a precursor to breaking up creeps into Tatsuya’s mind.

"No, I don't know anyone else like that. Nobody I know for sure."

"Doesn't matter if it's Tokyo or California, people are so guarded with that stuff, huh," Shuu shrugs, "I just thought you'd have some other friends in Japan like you."

"You thought wrong, then, didn't you," Tatsuya snaps and stands up briskly, "I hope you find _someone like me_ when you go back."

"Tatsuya, oi, that's not I meant!"

But Tatsuya's already hopping down the stairs, turning only to offer a snatched, "Don't follow me," before he dips out of sight behind the huge half-pipe like a scoop out of the earth. 

"Wasn't gonna," Shuu mutters to himself alone with his beaten-up skateboard, because he knows how Tatsuya deals with these things. Or rather, how he cools off. And Tatsuya should know it too, but he still says it each time. Not to follow him.

\--

But it's hardly fair on him to have to dredge up a definitive list. The coincidence that he met Shuu in his territory, another basketball player, and seems to have him in his thrall for just about anything Californian, anything Asian-American at all, and now any tips or tricks that would get him a comfortable welcome back home to Japan. Tatsuya hardly gets treated like a native in his own home, for Christ's sake. He wants to know what makes Shuu think that Tatsuya knows everything.

No, that’s unfair. He knows Shuu doesn’t think that really, but when he delivers it with all the grace of an underpaid bouncer it sounds like he’s playing dumb.

He doesn't know everything. He doesn't know who of his local streetballers, not even the ones who 'wanted to experiment' with him and who found him lovelier than a girl the same age, are gay. No idea. Zero assumptions and certainly no accusations if he doesn't want a forensics team to have to scrape him off of the sidewalk the next day. 

He's messed up even thinking that he himself might be, sometimes. The way Shuu said it -- ‘queer’ -- that’s fine, like he knows he isn’t settled on a definition. Shuu seems pretty comfortable with himself in that sense, and with him he feels light enough to lean into it, but left alone he’s hardly out and proud. 

No, he knows some things. He knows what he can't resist; a little muscle, a sweetness, some trash-talk, a little attitude. Things that are familiar.

'Other friends', Shuu's little throwaway, is the nail in the coffin.

He thinks about Taiga, the only one ‘like him’ of anyone -- the only person he knows who Shuu hasn’t met. 

Who he hasn’t seen since he went back to Japan. And now Shuu is about to follow him on his merry way out of Tatsuya’s life.

In a way, that remains the biggest mystery for him. When he caught Taiga looking he had no idea what he saw, or what he saw Taiga see. Maybe Alex had a hunch from the outside but there was so much she wasn't present for, and who snitches to their teacher if they value their friends?

He isn't sure, which is to say, he knows enough to hold his breath subconsciously when he thinks of those moments.

If Taiga looked at him when they changed clothes, that was because they were having a conversation.

If Taiga looked at him from the sidelines, it was because he was watching his play.

If Taiga stared at him between sprints and penalties, it's because he was zoning out.

He wasn't looking at Tatsuya's exterior and he wasn't trying to puzzle out the interior.

He's only caught Taiga looking all this time because he's been looking back at him.

Surely.

When Tatsuya thinks about that, he has no idea what's normal any more. 

Taiga grew a couple of inches taller than him, a gentle change, Tatsuya's throat tightening whenever he noticed the difference shoulder-to-shoulder-- that's not jealousy, he realises suddenly. That's a thrill.

His hands were big enough to snatch a ball out of Tatsuya's clasp. Fear that he was physically exceeding him, yes; but a kind of awe, too. 

He looked fiercer than ever when hormones blessed him with a strong jaw, thick eyebrows. Taiga lamented that Tatsuya was going to look like a store mannequin forever in his perfection while _he_ was already shaving. Tatsuya would smile and reassure him, "Nobody'll give you trouble with a glare like that."

"But I'm already getting it from school," he sighed, "Sayin' I look like I got attitude."

He never felt like correcting him.

He's the only one _like him_ in any way, but he doesn't know anything for sure. 

Although he can imagine it just fine -- the chainlink fence that digs into his jutting shoulderblades could be from being pushed into it, his sore feet from standing, breathless from touch and thrill, the sweat from Taiga's heat, the fire he always seems to nurse inside his body -- he can think about Taiga as much as he likes and it doesn't change anything at all in the real world. Just because he knows what he looks like naked-- heard the sounds he makes in his dreams at a summer sleepover, felt his chest bump against his back on the court, damn it, that doesn't mean anything. Taiga's hand closing over his when he was wishing good luck on their rings. Taiga's breath in his ear after sprinting for a bus. The taste of his mouth on the rim of a shared bottle of soda.

It doesn't say anything about Taiga and it doesn't make him at all _like_ Tatsuya.

Tatsuya doesn't know that much about anyone, so he doesn’t know anyone like him.

\--

With a breath Shuu pushes Tatsuya’s thigh back, gripping under his knee. Their weight on the bed makes the springs squeak. “Ready?”

“Yeah,” Tatsuya says, doing his best not to arch in a way that would only have Shuu’s temper snap with impatience, and grips the covers with his curled toes, the loosest tug of his fingers. He runs his lube-slicked fingers over and into him briefly then lifts, the pace moving altogether too quickly but not as exceedingly fast as Tatsuya’s unfortunately familiar with and he forces himself to exhale, to relax, as Shuu pushes forward and enters him, biting his lip above him while he pauses for Tatsuya’s sake. 

What hasn’t changed since their first time has been this level of tender care; at no point does it look like he’s going to give it up. Although, God knows Tatsuya could use a rest, and isn’t it just ridiculous that he finds it curled up under his boyfriend like this, letting his breath out in short, controlled huffs so it doesn’t look like he’s gasping with pleasure, even though he is. At least Shuu never acts like he’s being gentle. There’s a difference between being and acting. Once Tatsuya’s used to the sensation, the head of his cock thick and stretching him, he opens his eyes, looking at Shuu who blinks back at him. His hair’s already sticking to his forehead with sweat. He looks older, they always both feel a little older when they’re doing this, when they’re not competing with the outside world.

“You good?” he asks.

“Fuck,” is all Tatsuya can manage as Shuu goes ahead and moves anyway but slowly because the question is actually _I’m going, you’ll say what you want_ , _right_ and he doesn’t want the checking-in, not really, he just wants to feel him deeper and hitting all the right places and the shove of his hips against his in this heavy summer heat.

Shuu’s weird question from the other day suddenly flashes into Tatsuya’s mind and he finds himself tensing up, which of course, Shuu reads wrong and he slows for a second before Tatsuya bucks against him to dispel any idea that he isn’t okay. 

He’s likely forgotten all about it despite this being their first convening since he’d stormed off that time, he probably has no idea that Tatsuya’s spent sweaty, anxious nights with loneliness stuck in his heart like a knife while twisting that question a thousand different ways in his mind. There isn’t even a decent conclusion to show for it.

God, he was probably just curious about it, wasn’t he? Genuinely thinking Tatsuya’s sociable enough that he has penpals in Japan and half the buddies he shares locker-rooms and courts with are bi or gay or something too? All it really means is that Tatsuya looks confident in what he does, enough to make Shuu believe it for real. Jesus Christ.

“Tatsuya,” he’s moaning against his ear, bent over and knuckles pushed into the mattress, the sound of it making him open his legs as if on command and Shuu slips deeper in a way that’s honestly -- really, when else can he be honest -- incredible, sends shivers over his skin but better than that, has Shuu gasping over him even as he’s trying to bring him off at the same time with a warm hand wrapped around him and tucked between their stomachs.

“Like that,” Tatsuya smiles and kisses at his exposed throat, plucking at the skin with his teeth to make him twitch and buck erratically, his favourite. 

August is coming to an end, his mind interrupts again.

Shuu is leaving, he’ll be gone. He’s become more outgoing and he’s at peace with his past. He’ll be happier in Japan, like Taiga, back with his family. Find somewhere you belong. Stick with people who love you.

Find someone who’ll love you like this and stay like that, forever.

Over him, just for a bare moment, Shuu’s wiry frame feels more muscular than it is and his voice a tad lower in its hoarseness, as he gasps, as he begs Tatsuya for release, tucked too tight to move under the grip of Tatsuya’s leg locked around his hips.

“Not yet,” he breathes, using the leverage to lift himself off the mattress just enough to rock against him instead, “not yet. Not yet.”


End file.
